Asian Artists at the 2001 Venice
When going to
the Venice Biennale for the first time this year, I was expecting to
see some kind of acceptance of the huge range of modernist art now produced
and exhibited in many Asian countries. Instead, I found myself in a
peculiar set of time warps, some constructed by, for example, the peculiar
historical architecture of Venice and the history of its Biennale, others
by the vagaries of the European art curatorial practice which, in part,
had chosen the works.
Suzann Victor (Republic of Singapore),
"Dusted by Ruch Manouvre", 2001, installation.
* By JOHN CLARK
In fact, to the visitor there is not one
Biennale, but four. In the first one the Giardini the
'national' pavilions are situated in, by turns, an Edwardian and early
modern architectural never-never land There, Britain faces a fascist
German neo-classical pile, with spaces for Japan (Fujimoto Yukio, Hatakeyama
Naoya, and Nakamura Masato), Korea (Suh Doo-ho and Michael Joo), Australia
(Lyndal Jones), and other late-comers to creep in, and with older cousins,
such as Russia (Sergei Shutov, Olga Chernysheva, and Leonid Sokov) reclaiming
their former sites. It is thus a cross between a nineteenth-century
world exposition and modern trade fair.
The second Biennale bears token adjustments to other expressions
in the thematic 'Plateau of Humanity', curated by Harold Szeeman in
the Italian pavilion (also in the Giardini). It includes the video work
of Xu Zhen, another piece by the late Chen Zhen in memoriam, and an
installation by the Korean Suh Do-ho. The third Biennale is a very long
corridor of fairground booths on each side of the late Renaissance factory
called the Arsenale, which is some distance away from the Giardini in
the old naval factory complex. Right at the beginning of the Arsenale
is a booth for the work of Xiao Yu, and towards the end, on the back
of the panels for someone else's installation, the photographs of Hai
Bo.
The fourth Biennale is spread out all over the city in
buildings temporarily loaned for the purpose: gothic palaces (Portugal:
João Penalva), a nineteenth-century learned society with rooms
used by Garibaldi (Belgium), old warehouses (Sweden), and a twelfth-century
nunnery turned into an ecclesiastical museum (New Zealand: Peter Robinson
and Jacqueline Fraser). A prisn with inscriptions that indicate that
the room had earlier been used by the council to judge secret denunciations
and that a patriot that had been tortured there by Mussolini's Fascists
also featured in the exhibition (Taiwan: Lin Shumin, Liu Shenfen, Lin
Minghong, Zhang Jianzhi (Chang Chien-chi) and Wang Wenzhi). Singapore
(Chen Kezhan, Salleh Jaspar, Matthew Ngui, and Suzann Victor) and Hong
Kong (Ellen Pau, Ho Siu-kee, and Leung Chi-wo) were found in adjacent
palazzi. Singapore
arguably had the best-produced and most sensible little national catalogue
and take-away linen book bag. As usual, there was no pavilion or direct
representation from India (Anish Kapoor had previously exhibited in
the British pavilion) or from the People's Republic of China. This time,
Szeeman included the artists mentioned and also used a large Swiss collection
at the Biennale in 1999 to make, one supposes, a curatorial intervention
in European cultural perceptions of China.1 With the exception
of Egypt, the Arab and Islamic world was largely absent.
The above indicates one may spend as much time in the
Biennale wondering why the works are in a particular space and how well
or how indifferently they relate to it, rather than thinking about the
works themselves, about the underlying curatorial concept and its validity.
Clearly these spaces give rise to two strategies by national curators,
one is to turn a whole building over to one artist who makes a work,
which can become site specific and plays off its site. The most satisfying
variants of this approach were the three video installations and exhibited
objects by Penalva in the Portuguese pavilion, and old Vendramin Palace.
The other approach is to produce large icon-like objects which dominate
an environment or which completely fill up a room.
Both these strategies were used to great effect by Suh
Do-ho, in first, a commemorative plinth borne by multitudes of small
figures and, then, in two works: Some/One,
in the Korean pavilion, where what might be a royal robe
of golden chain mail covered a room, but was made from single coin-like
metal pieces; and, in the Italian pavilion, was a translucent glass
floor held up by myriads of plastic figures with an all-over 'pin-head'
wall paper. On very close inspection, these became single digitized
images of human heads. The effective domination of space by minutely
articulated and replicated figures or images with the overall mass they
supported was quite astonishing, and he would have been awarded my Grand
Prize.
The spaces available to the overall curator also allow such domination
by specific artists; however, their layout as an exhibition, especially
in the Arsenale complex, incline towards mere iteration than curatorial
strategy. This impression was particularly strong where many of the
works were video 
pieces projected on the wall of a box. They did not make for an interesting
gallery-viewing experience, and it did not help that many were pieces
I had seen elsewhere as a casual visitor (Bill Viola in London and
Fiona Fan at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam).
Do-Ho Suh,
(Republic of Korea),
'Public Figures', 1998.
How much more so would this be the case for someone in the Euro-American
art exhibition cultures where such works are exhibited all the time?
Indeed, it seems to be the custom at Biennales; one had a distinct
feeling of having seen many of the artists and works before. Is this
tendency due to curatorial fear of flying with the phantom of the
new or simply due to museum fatigue? Perhaps both, but definitely
disproportionate space and attention has been given to several artists:
Serra, Twombly, the Kabakovs. I suppose selection for art exhibitions
cannot escape from the tyranny of canon, however implicitly this may
be posed, and all works may have to be judged by their propensity
to be absorbed into a canon given by the exhibition site, in this
case, a Euro-American one.
This 'pre-selection' is quite important for those not pre-selected,
since many do not fall into the cultural or stylistic nexuses defined
by hitherto and present curatorial practice. Some way out of this
was seen in the small 'African' exhibition, but even so, much of the
work there had already received the consecration of earlier Euro-American
exhibitions. The avoidance of 'pre-selection' would seem to be a good
reason for Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan not to seek to obtain
pavilions in the Giardini, for in their private palazzi
they can control their own selection, at least, and, in this regard,
claim their own canon. Nonetheless, should the People's Republic of
China have chosen to exhibit, it is very unlikely we would have seen
the Xiao Yu or Xu Zhen works to have been selected. Whereas Chinese
contemporary art in 1999 may be said to have played a mildly de-canonizing
role for the European works, exhibited at Venice, one may also conceive
that Xu Zhen's fictitious creatures a kind of three-dimensional,
plastic and gothic phatasmagoria, Jurassic Park creatures without
digitization could, by their very exhibition, escape the constraints
of official culture at home in China.
The major issue at stake is that, in works of the 'cadaver
group', which has used deceased human body parts in installations and
performed acts of cannibalism,2 we are dealing with work
which, in the guise of inner-cultural critique or aesthetic radicalism,
attacks many humanist ideals mediated by the notion of a sacrosanct
body ideas that may now be approaching cultural universality.
To exhibit minor versions of this oeuvre, such as the works of Hirst
in Britain (whom some cadaver artists claim as an influence and with
whom they are often compared), is, in my view, privileging complicity
with the very social horrors or baleful aesthetic tendencies their exhibition
is supposed to criticize or, at least, relativize.
Singapore and Hong Kong also demonstrated interesting
curatorial and artistic strategies, which allowed for some significant
interaction with the site of Venice. In the Singapore palazzo
was an adaptation of a piece already shown at home into a site-specific
work, where four arms of a candelabra were mechanically swung towards
a glass pendant piece in the middle. They were always in danger of colliding
and smashing the ensemble to the floor. Another element at the rear
of this installation had an unclear purpose, yet, suspended at the top
of the stairs in a restored but very old space, one could not but feel
the sense of cultural elision and near-destructive collision between
two unspoken entities. Indeed, the work spoke on many levels, articulated
because of this very adjustment to the space.
Another interesting strategy in use, is to insist on the
otherness of origin by anthropologizing its presence in the here and
now. Leung Chi-wo elegantly and eloquently achieved this by the exhibition
of a cookie-vending machine. By wrapping any item in one's possession
in a plastic bag and affixing it to the gallery wall, cakes could be
obtained from it; this cake vender was also at other specified sites
throughout the city. The cakes were in the positive shape of the sky
as viewed enclosed by high-rise buildings. Sitting at a table covered
with images of Hong Kong skyscrapers, one felt that, curiously enough,
a view of the world was being harmonized by its transposition to Venice.
One felt as if one was sharing in a memory, a memory made actual by
one's distant participation in it. *
Matthew Ngui
(Republic of Singapore), 'The chair', 1999, installation
COURTESY OF THE VENICE BIENNIALE.
Notes
1. See the essay by Francesca dal Largo
on the 1999 Biennale in: Clark, John (ed.), Chinese
Art at the Turn of the Millenium, Hong Kong: New Art Media
(2000).
2. See: Dawei, Fei, 'Transgresser le
principe céleste: Dialogue avec le group
cadavre' (Zhu Yu, Sun Yuan, Peng Yu), 'Représenter l'Horreur',
Hors Serie Artpress, (May 2001).